Vibrant Matter-An interview with Jane Bennett

Here is an interesting interview with Jane Bennett on issues of materiality and the emerging philosophy of the object world.  We read Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter in my “Political Lives of Things” course at Cornell last year.  But the text warrants more sustained engagement than I was able to give it in that class.  I’m intrigued in particular by her idea of “strategic anthropomorphism”.  But I am concerned that this ultimately ends up reducing “thingly” qualities to human qualities instead of investigating the unique character of objects–as if the human frame is the only one we can think within.  Exploring the unique character of things need not mean studying only the properties of materials (as Ingold seems to suggest in his essay Materials Against Materiality) but rather doing what archaeology has long done–conducting ethnographic fieldwork amongst the world of things.  To paraphrase the over-cited phrase from L. P. Hartley: the world of things is a foreign country.  They do things differently there.  Interview at link above or here: http://philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/vibrant-matters-an-interview-with-jane-bennett/

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